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Dessert

Dandy Pudding

A milk and egg pudding thickened with cornstarch, sweetened with sugar and lemon, topped with beaten egg whites and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,053 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Dandy Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Heat 1 quart of milk in a saucepan and sweeten with lemon flavoring.

  2. Mix 4 tablespoons of cornstarch in some cold milk.

  3. Beat the yolks of 3 or 4 eggs and stir into the cornstarch mixture.

  4. Add this mixture to the boiling milk and cook for 10 minutes.

Top and bake

  1. Beat the egg whites until light and fluffy, then mix in 8 teaspoons of sugar and the juice of 1 lemon.

  2. Heap the egg white mixture over the pudding in large spoonfuls.

  3. Brown slightly in the oven.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cornstarch
Thickens the milk into a smooth, sliceable custard as it cooks.
Egg yolks
Enrich the custard and add richness and body to the pudding.
Egg whites
Whipped to form a light, airy meringue topping that browns in the oven.
White sugar
Sweetens the meringue topping and helps it brown lightly.
Milk
Forms the base of the custard that the cornstarch thickens.

The step that matters

Add the cornstarch mixture to the boiling milk and cook for 10 minutes. Cornstarch needs to reach a boil and be stirred and cooked fully to swell and thicken. Undercooked starch leaves a thin, starchy-tasting custard.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, egg, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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